Best Ways to Gather and Handle Customer Feedback
What is Customer Feedback?
Customer Feedback is either satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a product or a service. You can gather it through surveys, email, letters, or phone calls from the customer to the company. Customer comments and complaints are important resources. They can help in improving and addressing the needs and wants of the customer.
Why Gather Feedback?
- It offers the best way to measure customer satisfaction. Feedback determine whether your product or service meets or exceeds customer expectations.
- It provides insights to create a better customer experience. You can create a personalized customer experience if you know what they want.
- It can help improve customer retention. By requesting customer feedback, you can ensure you keep the finger on the pulse. You can address their frustrations and keep them wanting to do business with you.
- These experiences may help someone make the decision to work with your organization. The feedback you collect, like good news stories, could be the key for new clients to access your service.
Best Ways to Gather Customer Feedback
Gathering feedback improves your business process. It also makes the customer feel heard and involved. The involvement helps bring your customer back and can improve their dedication to your brand. Jason Westland, in his article at The Project Manager, recommended ways to best collect customer feedback:

Live Chat
Email Outreach
Email remains a valuable tool a business has to gather candid customer feedback. Once you write back and start a dialogue, there’s an opportunity to build bonds and strengthen customer loyalty.
Send an email to collect customer feedback, especially when a user does something significant: signs up, upgrades to or exits a plan, and so on. A quick one-liner question can gain insight at the right time.
Survey
Phone Calls
The phone is a more personal and intimate communication tool. It results in a more authentic conversation. It can also excite a customer to speak to a real person. It provides an opportunity for them to express how we can improve a product or service.
The person calling the user should understand their problem and offer solutions. Keep in mind the best times to call. Studies have shown that customers are more likely to respond between 8 AM and 9 AM, and between 4 PM and 5 PM. Lunchtime, between 1 PM and 2 PM is the absolute worst time to reach out to anyone. Also, it an era where people are bombarded by robocalls, it can be difficult to get customers to answer. Using a number with CallerID that clearly shows your company name can help but connection rates are often poor.
Customer Forums
Social Media
Best Ways to Handle Customer Feedback
- Identify product improvement areas. Your user will always have some ideas that you did not think of.
- Feed customer feedback into your product road map. It can come very close to the ideal market fit.
- Find your niche. Customer feedback can be a good way to find out where you belong.
- Prevent customer churn. Any feedback is a display of interest in your product. Showing that you care goes a long way in building a healthy business relationship.
- Discover potential advocates and nurture them. Gathering feedback will help you identify the happiest of your users. The next step is to nurture them into advocates.
- Motivate your team. Share conversations that are interesting. Come up with new ideas about the product (improvements or game changers) with the whole team. It would help everyone understand the larger picture.

There are many reasons for the failure of a new business startup. By being aware of those mistakes, you can learn how to avoid them in your business.